Fluffy 'Little Black Book' twists into a mean and ugly blanket of deception

By SEAN AXMAKER, SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 5, 2004

For the bulk of its running time, "Little Black Book" satisfies the requirements of the lighthearted romantic chick-flick. Brittany Murphy, all doe eyes and fluttering lashes and girlish shrieks, is Stacy, an aspiring broadcast journalist doing her apprenticeship in the less-than-glamorous world of syndicated talk-shock daytime TV.

When she discovers that her boyfriend, Derek (a generically amiable Ron Livingston), once dated a famous fashion model, momentary jealousy spirals into obsession. She hacks his electronic organizer, tracks down his old girlfriends and surreptitiously interrogates the exes, even bonding with one (Julianne Nicholson) while her rickety house of lies collapses around her.

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Hard lessons learned and end of story, right?

Not quite, and that's what makes "Little Black Book" so perversely fascinating, if ultimately disappointing. What starts as a cutesy-pie comedy with a snarky sense of humor gets twisted, as if the artistic team found an entirely different film buried in the hypocrisies and contradictions of the script.

Murphy can't decide whether she's trying to shuck her kewpie doll image or embrace it. She narrates her story with an apologetic tone that begs forgiveness. As her actions become more cruel and vindictive, it comes of as a pathetic attempt to keep the audience from turning on her.

Her fellow producer Barb (Holly Hunter), however, is furtively ambitious and insidiously devious as the devil on her shoulder. It's as if the morally resolute producer Hunter played in "Broadcast News" recovered from a nervous breakdown as a reality TV junkie. She unapologetically embraces the good, the bad and the ugly of her actions in the film's inspired climax: trash-talk TV as tough-love psychotherapy.

Nick Hurran is a deft director who engages his characters in uncommonly nuanced relationships and keeps the film buzzing through the most contrived moments. But he sacrifices Stacy's cliche of a journey for the ambiguity and dramatic passion of Barb's living theater.

The result is a film with an identity crisis, a fluffy romantic farce that gets progressively darker, more destructive and finally so downright demented that the featherweight story line is crushed under the weight of brutal, unpleasant truth.